SPIRIT CODEX: Drawings by SOLANGE KNOPF
There is a difference between art that documents a journey through visionary waters
and art that is a by-product of the visionary process itself. When one begins to reexamine so-called visionary and art brut by these terms it becomes obvious that the
majority of art in our field falls into the first category. This is not a value judgment-quality is quality. It is either present or it isn’t.
A narrative does not require the participation of the artist in the story he or she is
telling. A quick example of this would be in Haiti where many paintings show Vodou
iconography and Vodou ceremonies but the painters themselves are not necessarily
Vodou participants. In essence they are documenting Vodou more akin to memory
paintings of spiritual history. Look at the difference between a Clementine Hunter
painting of workers in a cotton field and a construction by Lonnie Holley or Kevin
Sampson, both making extensions of the spirit yards of the South. Sampson and Holley are actively adding to and participating in a process, which can never be repeated or reproduced. We see so much work on the ’outsider’ platform, which may
derive from the actual life or state of the artist but do not depict an active living
moment of spiritual participation or process. Within this there is still the chance for
brilliance and masterpieces on the plus side, but on the down side it can become a
generic cliché; horror vacui, geometric mingling of faces and cross hatching that cover a page completely and ultimately, in visionary terms, result in a static statement
with a low rate of innovation and development.
We see more and more of this downside as the field of self-taught artists grows
exponentially. As curators, scholars, dealers and collectors we are constantly confronted with establishing criteria of authenticity based on ‘eye’ and suspension of
disbelief, all of this mostly subjective. At this time in the field it would be quite simple
to fill a room wall to wall, ceiling to floor with these generic drawings and run into
some definite confusion differentiating between the artists.
This seeming uniformity of look is mostly a contemporary Western phenomenon.
Non-western artists have greater isolation from each other and so their styles seem
that much less influenced by materials other than those directly in the caches of their
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own cultures. If you look at the work of African American artists from the black belt
of the Southern United States, for example, you can see the huge variations and
personal stylizations in each artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; work. They may be influenced by the same cultural forces, but each has taken it somewhere completely individual. The language is
in common; the songs sung within it are individual. In the earlier pre-workshop days
of art brut one can see this as well in the artworks collected by Hans Prinzhorn, for
example, and other early, seminal collections.
The great number of workshops and faux-brut art of today creates a huge contemporary problem. But it is a specialized problem. Under the greater canopy of
Contemporary Art, which pays little attention to intentionality and context, it is either
liked or not liked, good or not good, indeed the intentionality of an artist is very often seen as a hindrance to its ultimate appreciation by the canon.
But if you are in the field of non-mainstream artists, if you do have criteria of quality, which include intentionality, authenticity, originality of concept and uniqueness
of vision it can be a completely different story. One sees immediately how strong
individual visions can get lost in the sea of horror vacui wiki, the glut of outsider-like
art on the market by both mainstream and non-mainstream artists. Those real visionary voices can be obscured and appreciated for all the wrong reasons, or worse, not
appreciated at all for their unique voices. If you add to this the propensity for privileged mainstream artists to utilize, cannibalize and outrightly plagiarize the works or
the 'look' of non-mainstream artists you have a new not yet branded form of primitivism, where the source material is often of deeper intensity and of higher quality
than the work it has been appropriated for.
Solange Knopf was born in Brussels in 1957. Like many others of her generation she
dipped in and out of the world counterculture of the 60's and 70's and travelled the
globe. Circumstances led to some personal tragedies and drawing became a way
of assuaging pain, depression and confusion, confronting her own and other's demons to give her life a focus.
We were very fortunate with the glowing work of Solange Knopf because we came
to it, or it to us, at a point of amazing transition, in evolution from smaller and more
autobiographically self-conscious works to a larger more open format and a more
unique but universal content. She, like so many others, had been largely ignored because the Gatekeepers felt the work was too sophisticated to be 'pure' art brut and
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too brut or singulier and out of touch with the canon to be counted as Contemporary Art. That the work itself was brilliant and technically and spiritually rich never
seemed to enter the equation.
What attracted us first to the work was that it never had that ultimate blank stare
that generic horror vacui work had. There was space in it. Her marks breathed.
These marks on paper, the fill-ins of pattern were never mathematical. They reflected a passion in the artist that immediately differentiated her. At the time we saw
the first work we had just been looking at work by artist, Unica Zurn, and saw certain
affinities, but it was the vast differences that roped us in even though both women
were describing the landscapes of ravaged female psyches.
If Zurn was the dark maiden of Thanatos and submission, Knopf is light, sensuality
and Eros, mystical and mythical. Knopf isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t locked into tragedy, her world is huge
and she is expanding and adding to it as if paper were her own cave walls, an arena for female imagery that owes nothing to New Age or modernism. It is as if her
earlier works were preliminary incantations calling up the later entities.
Some of these earlier drawings we saw were made on pages of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire and Charles Baudelaire. It draws to mind that state we go into
when we read incredible poetry and putting the book down, pass into a hypnogogic
state that dances between the imagery we have just been reading and our own permutation of it into waking dream. These drawings sing their intelligence and cultural
depth at the same time they strive to get free of any kind of mental bondage. They
acknowledge darkness and light and never lose sight of the mark of the hand and
the power of self-redemption.
Even today in the series, Behind the Darkness and Spirit Codex, Knopf has not
erased the presence of the hand, which is connected directly to the heart. From a
distance the drawings are seamless and seemingly symmetrical, tight and deceptively balanced. Up close the heart wins out and one sees the precision is really an illusion. The artist told me in a conversation that the change between the earlier drawings and the scrolls was her willingness to erase the vestiges of narrative and begin
to work intuitively and improvisationally. More musically.
But there is something more. Something that is also missing in those generic drawings
of others in the field. These drawings may depict feminine spirit and allude to mythic
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beings but there is a very human presence behind them, a conductor in this visual orchestra and that is a presence, the feminine manifestation of Solange Knopf herself,
her dreams, her fears, her joys that invest these drawings with a living power that is
not classic, that moves on the savage edges of our own dreams and mythos.
She may have depicted a world but she is the guide to that world. If it is a narrative it is created by the one who lives it as it unscrolls, the result of mature vision to
express the nearly intangible, the nearly ineffable. She will guide you through its
canals in a gondola of smooth movement and grace but she will not explain all of it
to you. She is happy to keep it as a Mystery to herself as well. She will not protect
you from the darkness, but she will unveil some of its secrets and its terrible beauty
and allow you to form your own conclusions. There is horror, there is pain, there is
ecstasy and there is the timeless miasma of numinous history. She is still in the center,
absorbing it. This is a different kind of narrative. More of a chant than a story. The
disconnects cause the tensions that draw us in.
The baseline of my own narrative here is that it doesn't matter to me at all whether
the work of Solange Knopf is called Outsider, Art brut, Art Singulier, Contemporary
Art or Visionary art. None of these labels can or will change a thing. I stand before
the scrolls of Spirit Codex and realize that I am looking at monumental drawings of
aspects of the female psyche that I have not seen sung this way anywhere before.
That while the canons of the art world were imploding on themselves Solange Knopf
was in her studio home channeling her own dreams of universal portents, visualizing
icons of female beings from her own rich interior life, breaking free of the chains of
art world branding to offer us exquisitely colored and drawn, dangerous, personal
images that are simultaneously strong and fragile, images along the path of an extraordinary visionary process.
Randall Morris
NYC
May, 2014